With the increasing concerns for the environment and resource recovery in the past several years, recycling of cans, and especially aluminum cans, for recovery of the metal and subsequent remelting and reuse of the metal has become commonplace.
Typically, consumers bring empty cans to a mobile or permanent recycling facility, where the cans are weighed and the customer is paid for the weight of the cans delivered. More recently, mechanical devices, sometimes referred to as "reverse vending machines", have begun to appear. These machines accept cans from consumers, weigh the cans and pay out the appropriate renumeration therefore.
Whether the cans have been collected at a permanent, mobile or mechanical collection facility, the cans must eventually be transported to a smelter, where the cans are remelted and new molten metal, ingots or sheet is produced.
To efficiently and economically transport cans from one location to another, and especially when transporting large numbers of cans to a smelter, it is highly desirable that the cans be flattened, thus reducing their volume and increasing the number of cans which may be transported in a single truck or other transporting unit. Therefore, numerous can flatteners have been developed in the past.
While commercially acceptable flatteners have been produced, the currently available flatteners each have one or more problems associated therewith. Many flatteners are quite large, eliminating their use as a part of a reverse vending machine or in a mobile recycling center. There are units that require high frictional resistance, thus increasing energy cost. Some flatteners do not consistantly flatten, i.e., they tear and flatten, and thereby do not offer effective can density. Then there are those that say they are flatteners, but only offer a somewhat crushed can, unable to justify their use as a high density flattener unit.
It is thus a primary objective of the present invention to produce a can flattener which is free from the defects common to currently available units.